Google Analytics GA4 Overview

In the below tutorial we review the basics of Google Analytics GA4 from what is changing and how to view some of the basic site data. 

Video Tutorial

Video Transcript

00:01 Hi everyone, Scott with Proactive Web Solutions and I want to do a video to talk about Google Analytics and specifically GA4, which is a new version of Google Analytics. 00:11 A lot of you may have seen emails from Google encouraging you to upgrade or even dove in and tried to and taken a look at the new version of Google Analytics and seen that things are a little bit different than they were with the previous iteration. 00:26 So first of all, what is it and what’s going on here? So a while back, Google released a new version of their analytics offering. 00:36 Called GA for Google Analytics four. And it is essentially like a new upgrade to how they collect data and how marketers can look at data and understand what’s going on on their website. 00:56 Think of it like a new version of iOS software for Apple users or a new version of Windows, for Windows users that, you know, improvements are made and everyone’s sort of, has to upgrade at a certain point. 01:19 Behind the scenes there’s actually more to it. The older version of Google Analytics Google has been sued for and there are these class action multi-million dollar lawsuits out there against them for how they were collecting data. 01:37 Particularly in Europe and different parts of the world. And they are essentially shutting down that old version of Google Analytics. 01:46 So historically the local moms network has been using the what’s called universal analytics. Their older version of analytics. We are now forced to upgrade to this new version called GA4. 02:04 And a lot of you have been receiving emails or warning messages in Google Analytics about you must upgrade, you must upgrade. 02:10 And they are kind of being a little bit obnoxious about that. Fortunately we’ve invested the local moms network. Orc has invested in that upgrade, we’ve been proactive with it. 02:27 And earlier this year all the sites on the local mom network should be upgraded to this new GA4. Which is you know, needs to be done by July 1st. 02:36 So I want to do a video here to take a look at some of those settings. But there’s more to re- read about if you want to learn about the upgrade. 02:52 Let’s dive in though and look at how to analyze the data. Because this new version of GA4 is actually really powerful, but it is different than the old version. 03:01 It’s not apples to apples as far as how the interface looks or how- the data is collected. So when you go to analytics, it’s the same location. 03:23 Analytics.google.com is really the URL so I try to highlight it here. Analytics.google.com. You want to use the URL so I try to highlight it here. 03:59 So when you go to analytics, it’s the same here we’re looking at the right data. This is a really important first step. 04:19 So when you’re logged in, there’s a couple ways to do it, but up top here there’s this dropdown menu and for the sake of this user that I’m logged in for, I have access to a website, essexcountymoms.com on the local mom’s network. 04:48 And you’ll see here that there’s two properties. One is the old version of the Google Analytics, which has the UA ID under it. 04:56 That’s how I know it was called Universal Analytics. That’s where all of my historical data has been prior. So, our historical data, going back from when your website was originally launched, up until the point of the transition to GA4, will still be available. 05:52 Google is telling us that this data will still be available until December 31st of this year, 2023. That may extend, who knows, but they are saying that they are going to shut down and terminate that data at the end of this year. 06:07 But for now, we have access to it and we can go back and look at historical data from you know, previous years of what went on on our website and things like that in this old version of Google analytics. 06:39 But let’s look at GA4. That’s who came in and looked at today. So we want to make sure we’re looking at. 07:03 At the right property. So we come in and we want to select that GA4 property. Another way to do this, I’m going to move my little video over here so I can have access to it is in analytics. 07:14 You can come to the admin area and under the admin area under property. You can make sure that you’re selecting the GA4 property as the right property that you’re viewing. 07:48 It should show up up top here as well. Now, as we go back to the homepage of analytics, now that we’re looking at the GA4 property. 08:21 This looks different than if you’re used to looking at GA4, as I mentioned. So let’s start by going to reports. 08:30 Now, GA4 has some really powerful things you can do if you’re an e-commerce website. And trying to track conversions and or if you are running Google ads for ad spending. 09:08 And you can really do some really powerful stuff with this. On the surface, the Local Mom’s Network, we’re really essentially looking for how much traffic is the website. 09:42 And we’re getting some of the more basic analytics, I would say. And so that we can communicate those with potential advertisers. 09:48 And also have an understanding for yourselves to make decisions on where you could grow the site. So under the reports area, let’s go through . 10:28 And so that we can communicate those with potential advertisers. And so that we can communicate those with potential advertisers. That will help us understand what’s going on over the past 30 days. 11:58 Now under acquisition, we can go to the acquisition overview and understand some things here. We want to know how many users have come to the site. 12:06 That’s a general, you know, stat that’s always been important. We can see that over that time period. On this same dashboard here, we can see where they’re coming from. 12:50 They’re mostly finding, 84% finding this website through organic. And that’s the free stuff in Google. People googling and getting to the website. 14:22 And that’s the free stuff in Google. What is their engagement on the website? This is where are they spending their time? 15:13 So we’ve got we see some charts here and stuff. I typically gravitate towards what pages and how much time are they spending on the site? 15:59 Close this here. Oh sorry. There’s one thing that I just thought of that I skipped over. When you initially log into Google Analytics, if you are receiving a box with a big countdown timer or these red banners that they’re putting up that says you must upgrade to Google Analytics for Google Analytics 16:54 , we have done that for you. I know Google is really trying to push everyone to it and that’s obnoxious and people are submitting support requests to us rightfully so saying hey are we in good shape here because it looks like scary when you see those big red boxes when you log in. 17:47 As long as you’re able to get to this GA-4 section you should be in good shape and you can see that data is flowing. 17:54 That means you’re in good shape and your account has been upgraded. If you’re not able to do that please let us know and we can look into that and make sure you have access. 18:43 That you need to for the sites that you manage. Sorry, back to where we were. So under engagement we’ve got. 18:49 You know, some some some key stats here events, pages, and screens. I like to look at this from time to time to see what screen types and page. 19:40 Pages are coming to the site. So under pages, if we have specific pages to the site, the most important page would just be this first, this one that’s just the slash. 19:50 That’s our home page. So usually that’s actually in the number one position where it’s getting the most traffic because that’s where people first will. 20:38 And when they come to the website and in this case, they must be getting good organic results on this site for some particular article about something about being a stay at home mom. 20:50 But seeing specific pages in here is key. And if we actually wanted to find a specific URL, we could use this search tool. 21:42 So if you had a specific blog post that was maybe from a particular advertiser that you did, you could use this search tool here and put in the full address or even just part of that. 22:40 URL and like if I put in stay at home long as part of this search it’ll find that specific URL. 22:50 Obviously, I just put in part of the URL and it found this one here, which is great. And I can see the specific traffic. 23:42 For that URL. So I know that that’s something that comes up from time to time where you want to see how a particular post performed so that you can report back to an advertiser on that. 23:53 And that’s where you come in to do this. The other thing that I find interesting is what, screen sizes devices are being used here and after mind myself here where that is, I thought it was under this section. 24:58 But let me find that for you in one second here. I-I-I-I’m sorry, I’m just sort of reminding myself here. Sorry. 26:07 We- come back to it in a second as we keep exploring. Under the monetization tab tab, or not ha- we don’t have any of this setup because we’re not in ecommerce based website. 27:08 This is where some of the more powerful tools come in for e-commerce sites. Obviously, we’re not having users go through che- I got processes and things of that nature for- for the local MOM’s network’s core sites. 28:12 I guess it’s under tech here, tech details. Let me take a look at this. Yes, this is where I think I wanted to look at. 28:18 So I’m usually not as interested. In what browser type people are using on the website. That’s not as interesting to me, but there should be a thing. 29:22 Here it is. So under user details under the tech overview, we can see that the majority of traffic, 68%, that’s more than two thirds of traffic is coming from users on mobile devices. 30:31 And I think we have to remind ourselves of this when we often as content creators, we’re spending time building our blog posts and our content via our laptops or desktops and looking at the site ourselves mostly on those devices. 31:40 We have to remember that our users out there in the field are actually, you know, viewing your website via mobile devices for the most part. 31:48 And I sort of lump in tablets with that data as well. It’s very, low. But usually concern what we’ve seen for the local Moms Network is that it usually is the majority of traffic. 32:55 It’s right on point with what we’ve seen. 68 upwards to even 75 or 80 percent sometimes of overall traffic is people out there on the, smartphones checking out the site. 34:06 So that is an important stat that I like to glance at every once in a while just to sort of remind myself, oh yeah, even though I’m spending a lot of time viewing my own website via my desktop or laptop, most of my, users are on mobile. 35:19 So these are just some of the set of core stats that we look at that I think are useful. I hope will be useful for you going forward. 35:29 There is a lot of advanced stuff you can do as far as report. So I think that’s a great thing and it’s not looking into more granular data but hopefully this helps answers some core questions on Google Analytics for what they call GA4 and you can go in here and take a look for yourself and make 36:50 sure that you’re that your site is you have access to your new GA4 property. It’s receiving it’s receiving data. Data is flowing from your website to this new GA4 property and you can start to use it going forward. 38:04 If you have any questions feel free to let us know and we hope this was helpful.